The real costs of tuition tax credits

Calculations of the costs of tuition tax credits should include estimates of the induced migration from public to private schools. The estimate by the President's advisors that his 1983 tax credit proposal would cost up to $800 million by 1986 neglected the migration factor. It is demonstrated that a migration from public to private schools of about from 1 to 1.4% of the present public school enrollment is all that is necessary to secure savings from migrants that just offset the loss in federal tax revenue from tax credits granted to incumbent private school families. Greater migration will generate net revenue gains to governments as a whole.     

The revival of ‘native administration’ in the Sudan: A pragmatic view

The basic theme of this paper is to trace the pragmatic attempts of different governments in the Sudan to revive the system of native administration. The need for this revival became clear shortly before the overthrow of Nimeiry's government in April 1985. The approaches to this revival followed two main lines. The first approach adopted piecemeal reforms initiated by individual regional governments before 1986. In the second approach the central government adopted a comprehensive strategy to revive native administration. The implications of these attempts and their expected influence on the new multi-party system in the Sudan are briefly analysed in this paper. The data for this article was collected by the author while touring the Eastern and Western regions with an ILO project identification team between March and June 1986 as a consultant on local government and popular participation.     

In-migration and the labor market in Tijuana,Baja California

This interpretative essay on the status of migrant workers in the Tijuana labor market sets up a theoretical framework and specifies the data sources used, including a survey of 672 families in Tijuana in 1982. To define the sphere of analysis, the author discusses demographic behavior and the evolution of the labor market in Tijuana. Within this context, an examination of the work status of migrants is conducted by comparing it to that of the native population, taking into account the characteristics of their regions of origin and factors related to that work status. It is shown that 1) migrants come from areas which are relatively more developed; 2) their work experience is directly related to the nature of the relative degree of development of their regions of origin; 3) there is no difference between the migrants and the native population with regard to the sectors and positions in which they are inserted; and 4) the type of migration tends to be similar to migration taking place in industrialized countries, rather than that characterizing developing countries.     

Melancholic citizenship in the south Tel Aviv protest against global migration

Combining anthropological analysis with the discipline of urban studies and the theory of melancholy, this article offers the concept of ‘melancholic citizenship’ to describe the emotion of sadness aroused among a discriminated group of citizens in light of a process that highlights their social marginality. The case study explored is the struggle of old-time Mizrahi (Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries) residents of the Hatikva neighborhood – a lower income neighborhood of south Tel Aviv – against the inflow of African migration to the area. Based on anthropological field work I conducted in the neighborhood between the years 2010–2013, I argue that the struggle of the longstanding residents aroused melancholic feelings among them when they realized that the global migration is a current indication of their discrimination as lower income Mizrahim who inhabit the city periphery and are located at the margins of Israeli society.     

Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition: A comment

This comment is concerned with the relation between the basic model of elections and income redistribution in Lindbeck and Weibull (1987) and the model in Coughlin (1986a). Its purpose is to (i) isolate the (small set of) assumptions that separate these closely related models, (ii) identify a special case of the Lindbeck-Weibull model where their results immediately provide direct extensions of four of the results in my paper, and (iii) point out that one of the lemmata in my paper identifies the precise location of the equilibrium income distribution for this important special case of the Lindbeck-Weibull model. The comment also relates these observations to Lindbeck and Weibull's example of familiar assumptions that satisfy their sufficient conditions for the existence of a political equilibrium.I gratefully acknowledge (i) some helpful comments that Peter Ordeshook made as a discussant for Coughlin (1986a) (when I presented it at the 1986 Public Choice Society Meeting), which got me to start thinking about the issues that are addressed in this comment and (ii) some helpful suggestions provided by Peter Aranson.     

PACs,lobbies and political conflict: The case of gun control

Previous research has shown that PAC contributions from the National Rifle Association as well as letters and lobbying by Handgun Control, Inc. significantly affected Congressional voting on the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986, holding constant ideology, party, constituency characteristics, and a proxy for prior position on the issue. Using data from that study, this paper shows that contributions have a somewhat different effect than lobbying. Contributions from NRA were primarily targeted at NRA supporters and had the net effect of making the progunners even more so. Contributions from Handgun Control, while they did not significantly reinforce the proclivities of the gun controllers, were directed only at that group. At least in this case, money appears to exacerbate conflict. By contrast, the police lobby directed its attention at both gun controllers and pro-gunners; the lobby effectively induced pro-gunners to moderate their position. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that PACs associated with membership groups, which seek to retain members whose primary reason for joining is self-expression, are likely to allocate monies in such a way as to exacerbate policy conflict and to allocate lobbying activities so as to induce moderation. Nonetheless, because the gun issue is unidimensional, the finding that money fosters conflict implies only that Congress will be noisy, but not in disequilibrium.     

Silence of the Innocents: Undocumented Immigrants’ Underreporting of Crime and their Victimization

Do undocumented migrants underreport crimes to the police in order to avoid being deported? And do criminals exploit such vulnerability? We address these questions using victimization surveys and administrative data around the 1986 U.S. immigration amnesty. The amnesty allows us to solve two major identification issues that have plagued this literature: migrants’ legal status is endogenous and unobserved. The results show that the reporting rate of undocumented immigrants is 17 percent, which limits the immigrants’ ability to protect some of their fundamental human rights. However, right after the 1986 amnesty, which disproportionately legalized individuals of Hispanic origin, crime victims of Hispanic origin show enormous improvements in reporting behavior. The implied increase in the reporting rate by amnesty applicants is close to 20 percentage points.     

Controlling immigration? How regulations affect migration flows

The aim of this article is to investigate whether or not and how immigration policies affect immigration flows. Such policy impacts have hardly been investigated so far as the necessary data is lacking. For the first time, two new datasets are combined to systematically measure immigration policies and bilateral migration flows for 33 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) destination countries from over 170 countries of origin over the period 1982–2010. The study finds that immigration policies have an important effect on immigration flows and thus that states are able to control their borders. To some extent the control capacities depend on other factors in attracting or deterring immigrants. The article shows that the deterrence effect of restrictive immigration policies increases when unemployment rates are high. It appears that, in these contexts, states start to care more about effectively protecting their national economy. Moreover, policies are more effective for migrant groups from former colonies or when the stock of this group is already high in a destination country. In these circumstances, information on border regulations are more easily disseminated, which in turn makes them more effective.     

Return migration,crime, and electoral engagement in Mexico

Since 2006, the Great Recession and tighter migration policies in the U.S. have increased the rates of return migration to Mexico. Scholars debate whether high rates of return motivate greater electoral engagement via the democratic norms returnees may bring back with them. An alternative account holds that returnees are seen as dissimilar by their non-migrant co-nationals, causing returnees to disengage from politics. We contribute to this debate using municipal data on voter turnout and on rates of return migration for the case of Mexico from 2000 to 2010. Relying on an instrumental strategy that exploits migrants’ exposure to changes in unemployment rates as an exogenous predictor for return, we find robust evidence that high rates of return result in less electoral participation in presidential and local elections. Besides, electoral disengagement seems to be intensified by the presence of criminal violence, which surged during our period of analysis. Return migration may have a positive impact on other modes of political participation; but at least when it comes to voting, our research aligns with the pessimistic camp of the debate in that return migration increases electoral apathy.     

The unacceptable inconstancy of data

The theory of modernization can be combined with historical structural analysis into a single explanatory schema to account for the determinants of migration. The pertinence of data with respect to the proposals contained in the theory is also discussed. The author illustrates an approximation between the kind of questions used in the investigation and the kind of answers delivered by various statistical instruments. Current problems of methodology such as the construction of data and analysis and diachronic-synchronic levels are discussed. Cortes states that 1) mechanical application of any technical statistics without considering the validity of the assumptions on which it is based or structure type produces invalid information and empirical answers without theoretical significance if structural felicity and the conjunction of theoretical relationships are not considered; 2) the internal connection between the various areas of social activities gives rise in empirical social investigation to matrices of data with high intercorrelation; 3) simple correlation analysis has serious limitations and can induce erroneous results from data due to the absence of control mechanisms; and 4) controlling the effect of other variables which may obscure the net effects of one variable over another happens at the moment of generating occurrences or through statistical control for which it is necessary to incorporate those variables in the analysis. Cortes uses the multiple linear regression model to control the effect of the other variables and uses partial correlation instead of regression coefficients. For the theory of migration this investigation points out that the volume of potential migrants is spurred by the farmers' modernization and discouraged by changes in the agrarian structure. Structural change would lessen the effect of modernization. Urban penetration played no significant role in determining potential migration.     

The Majority‐Minority Divide in Attitudes toward Internal Migration: Evidence from Mumbai

Rapid urbanization is among the major processes affecting the developing world. The influx of migrants to cities frequently provokes antagonism on the part of long‐term residents, manifested in labor market discrimination, political nativism, and violence. We implemented a novel, face‐to‐face survey experiment on a representative sample of Mumbai's population to elucidate the causes of anti‐migrant hostility. Our findings point to the centrality of material self‐interest in the formation of native attitudes. Dominant group members fail to heed migrants' ethnic attributes, yet for minority group respondents, considerations of ethnicity and economic threat crosscut. We introduce a new political mechanism to explain this divergence. Minority communities facing persistent discrimination view in‐migration by coethnics as a means of enlarging their demographic and electoral base, thereby achieving “safety in numbers.” Our article sheds light on the drivers of preferences over internal migration. It also contributes insights to the international immigration literature and to policy debates over urban expansion.     

Keywords revisited: The present as history

The Partition of India (1947) is commonly understood as a violent territorial and political separation of peoples, their forced evictions and migration as well as communal upheavals. But India's Partition can be seen as something more than separation of communities and the creation of distinct national identities. This paper suggests that refugee rehabilitation, one of the important processes of the post-Partition years, formed the rubric through which we remember 1947. Rehabilitation and resettlement of refugees formed the narrativizing principle of a number of novels that were written in the 1960s and 1970s in Bengal that deliberately looked at the fall-outs of the Partition other than communal tensions and migrations. Rehabilitation created a different experiential reality for a large number of refugees, and issues of home, settlement, livelihood, and work created a new body of literature that re-looked at Partition in important ways. In the course of this paper I examine some such novels in Bangla; one of which, Shaktipada Rajguru's Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (From Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi), is the story of a group of refugees’ journey to Dandakarnaya and then onto Marichjhapi in the Sunderbans that probes the circumstances behind one of Partition's most forgotten histories.     

Mexican migration policies after IRCA

The evolution since 1964 of Mexican government policy regarding migrant workers in the US is discussed. For a decade after the "bracero" program was terminated by the US, the Mexican government attempted to encourage creation of another legal framework for migration, regarded as inevitable whether legal or clandestine. Around 1974-75, a more distant attitude, termed the "policy of no policy," acquired considerable support in Mexican government and academic circles. The no-policy strategy allowed Mexico to achieve certain objectives regarding migration without prompting US intervention in its internal affairs, as for example by a linkage of US migration policy to specific Mexican government actions. The 1986 passage of the US Immigration Reform and Control Act effectively ended the no-policy strategy that had allowed the Mexican government to count on the continued emigration of Mexican workers without compromising its position of promoting respect for migrant rights. The unilateral change in the status quo by the US led to substitution of the "policy of dialogue," a clear signal of the Mexican government's search for a new migration agreement. The policy of dialogue has entailed greater discussion of the two traditional Mexican objectives regarding migration. Some progress has apparently been made concerning migrant rights, but the second and less explicit objective, that of preventing abrupt changes in US immigration policy and in migratory flows, is harder to judge. The atmosphere of freer public debate in Mexico is politicizing migratory policy.     

The dual illusion of grants-in-aid on central and local expenditures: A reply

In this Journal, Chu [Chu, H. Y. (2003). Public Choice, 114: 349–359] offered corrections for “inconsistencies” in the Logan model of dual fiscal illusion.] Logan, R. R. (1986). Journal of Political Economy,94: 1304–1318]. This paper shows that Logan (1986) introduced two prevailing models of fiscal illusion and chose to follow one of them for generalization. Chu has not corrected any “inconsistencies”. He has instead offered a generalization of the other type of illusion. This paper demonstrates that the Chu generalization suffers from multiple irrational and unachievable results, which is why Logan (1986) chose the original version in the first place.     

Variation in policy success: radical right populism and migration policy

How do radical right populist parties influence government policies in their core issue of immigration? This article provides a systematic analysis of the direct and indirect effects of radical right anti-immigration parties on migration policy reforms in 17 West European countries from 1990 to 2014. Insights from migration policy theory serve to explain variations in the migration policy success of the radical right. While previous studies mostly treat migration policy as uniform, it is argued that this approach neglects the distinct political logics of immigration and integration policy. This article reveals significant variations in policy success by policy area. While immigration policies have become more liberal despite the electoral success of the radical right, when the radical right is in government office it enacts more restrictions in integration policies. Accordingly, anti-immigrant mobilisation is more likely to influence immigrants’ rights than their actual numbers.     

Rethinking international migration: a review and critique

A new style of international migration, temporary and often illegal immigration in order to work, began to emerge after World War II. Many countries initiated immigration policies that gave the appearance of control, while their back doors remained open and, possibly, unclosable. In the US, it is slowly becoming obvious that foreign workers cannot be used as a temporary labor force at will. 2 usual theories of migration are the classical and the conflicts schools. The classical school presents migration as a rational, economic act that leads to economic adjustment between sending and receiving countries. The conflict school, often Marxist, views migration as an unequal process that leads to the inclusion of developing countries into the world capitalist system and to a widenin gap between rich and poor countries. The convergence of these 2 theories leads to the idea that although migration may be a survival strategy of individuals and households, it is also determined by a country's integration in the world economic system. The author reviews several books on immigration theory, which appreciate the complexity and worldwide character of migration; indicate that migration patterns are persistent; and support the view that migration is an economic, social, and political problem; and recommend that policies must be integrated and address the entire issue.     

Citizenship and migration in Arab Gulf monarchies

In many industrialized countries, the issue of migration has traditionally raised the question of whether migrant groups fully enjoy citizenship rights. Political debates about models of migration emphasize either the values of cultural diversity or the value of integration into ‘host’ societies, whereas fear and security concerns are often embedded in more populist debates. In the Arab Gulf region, as in many other regions, such as East Asia, this debate has taken distinctively different shapes, partially because the concept of citizenship remains a contested notion not just with regard to migrants, but also with regard to local populations. In addition to the contested nature of citizenship, migrants' lack of citizenship rights fulfils distinctive functions in what Saskia Sassen calls ‘global cities’. This concept links the Arab world with a new phenomenon of globalized migration in which the lack of both integration and citizenship is a defining principle. Using these two perspectives, this article examines the relationship between citizenship rights and migration in the Gulf region, drawing on data from the UAE along with Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar.     

Characteristics of Guatemalan migration of the Soconusco region in the State of Chiapas

This paper describes and analyzes the main characteristics identified in seasonal Guatemalan workers who migrate every year to coffee plantations in the Sosonusco region in the state of Chiapas. Stress is placed on the disadvantageous working and living conditions of said population in their original areas of residence, as a necessary referent for understanding the nature and function of seasonal migratory work as a part of a social sector whose living conditions are marked by poverty. The data utilized for the analysis were obtained through a survey carried out in the 1986-1987 harvest season, in which 591 migrants working in 13 ejido or privately-owned productive units in the municipalities of Tapachula and Union Juarez were interviewed.     

Private sector shrinkage and the growth of industrialized economies: Reply

Further tests and thoughts on the OECD data lead me to conclude that, if anything, my 1986 paper underestimated the magnitude of the inverse relation between economic growth and government size. If one takes the nominal-based measure of government scale, as advised by Saunders, the significance levels, coefficient magnitudes and goodness of fits improve over what I found with my initial investigation. I would suggest that Saunders reconsider his reluctance to believe that the size of the public sector is unrelated to economic growth in OECD countries over this time period.One additional thought appears relevant to the current policy debate concerning budget deficits and economic performance within the major industrialized economies. The empirical work displayed here and in my 1986 paper suggests serious problems associated with the various proposals urging governments to raise taxes and/or ease fiscal policy. Elsewhere, I have suggested that available empirical evidence implies that plans to increase taxes as a way out of budget deficits are plans that carry the potential for raising government spending and possibly future deficits as well. Coupled with the evidence presented here, we should also recognize the potential of tax increases to raise the level of government participation in a country and, accordingly, exert inverse influences on its future economic performance as well. As suggested in my 1986 paper, the empirical evidence may suggest the following irony: While political participants may crave larger and larger non-market resource allocations, their future ability to satisfy that craving may very well be severely constrained by the satisfaction of that same appetite.